In the last couple of days of the past year 2007 the World of Padman BOINC team has crossed the magic 1 million credits milestone. The WoP BOINC team was founded in the middle of 2006 with a list of several projects like QMC@Home, Rosetta@Home, SETI@Home, Climate Prediction to list only the most important. The idea behind is to bring existing BOINC users and World of Padman fans together as a team. (more…)
Not too long after the last release of SqDef 1.1E, an update has been released.
It’s a fairly large up, including a long awaited map editor the community this game garnered since it’s inception. That along with many other things.
Have a look at the screenshots as well as read the other updates below.
Speaking Hangman is a cross-platform bilingual game that’s both fun and educational, and suitable for the whole family.
You’ll need to have a Java 2 Java Runtime Environment installed on your system to play the game. If you’re not sure if the version of Java you’re running is adequate to the task, you can test it on the page you download the program from.
After you download the program, enter tar xzf speakinghangmanfree-0.2.0.tar.gz in the directory where you downloaded the archive. Before playing the game, enter the directory created by the tar extraction command and read the README, INSTALL, and LICENSE text files you’ll find there. Note that this is not free software, nor even open source. The licensing terms (read LICENSE.TXT in the same directory) provide only for “free-as-in-beer” usage.
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everybody! Here is the dev teams present to you: a new campaign, support for compressed savegames (savegame size goes down by more than 90%) and improved support for multiplayer campaigns (finally they really should be possible). There are more new and changed things but if you want some more info about what changed, have a look at this forum thread. As with the last development releases, we continue to offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which is likely to cause a serious headache…
Earlier this month we shared that as a Christmas present to gamers there would be an Enemy Territory: Quake Wars update that would put this first-person shooter at version 1.4. Due to a development delay, however, ET:QW v1.4 wasn’t released in time for the holidays…
Beyond the Red Line is a stand-alone total conversion for Freespace 2. It is based on the popular new tv-show Battlestar Galactica. The Demo allows players to play a tutorial, two single player missions and multiplayer. The Demo is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
Following Elephants Dream and Peach (to be released in April), both open-source movies sponsored by Blender, Blender, an open-source 3D modeling application, and CrystalSpace, another open-source project relating to 3D graphics, are starting out a new project – a 3D open-source professional game.
The project, called Apricot, will release the final game at the end of July, if all goes according to schedule, for Linux, Mac, and Windows along with all the models, sounds, and code used in it. The game will be mostly developed by a group of developers who will be paid to work in Amsterdam.
“The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry.”
In cooperation with GarageGames.com you can now download the full version of DH Lore: Invasion for FREE!!!! ( http://www.garagegames.com/products/29 )
Released in the spring of 2004, DH: Lore has enjoyed a loyal following and in preparation for the upcoming release of the next generation of Lore games we are giving Invasion away for free across the supported platforms.
With this change Max Gaming is proud to be turning over release of community generated patches to the Skunkworks mod team, who along with the Ambassadors core has keep the community going for the last year.
About a week ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled “New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition” yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games, regretable since his conclusion was that it “blows away its competition”. This was done in the same style as Barr’s previous feature, “Tremulous: The best free software game ever?” which described Tremulous but also lacked comparisons and relations to other games. This feature hopes to be a thorough comparison of the major free software shooters.
There have been many free software first-person shooters (FPS) projects over the years, from modded Doom and Quake engines to enhance the existing games (ezQuake, EGL, ZDoom), to free art packs such as OpenQuartz or OpenArena. In 2002, along came Cube, a single and multiplayer FPS based on its own engine, including artwork, maps, models and an ingame map editor. In the freeware (and Linux compatible!) world a little-known game called Legends, a Tribes-inspired game, appeared yet remained closed-source. Filling the FPS gap in the open-source world has usually been left up to commercial companies who release their games with Linux support (i.e. Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Loki Software’s work) or freeware games produced by commercial studios(i.e. America’s Army, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) or simply running Windows games run via wine. In the last few years a few built-from-scratch community-based FPS projects, most built on the GPLed Quake engines, have popped up, among them are Tremulous, Alien Arena, Nexuiz, and War§ow. Some have kept their art assets under a closed license (War§ow), while others have also released their art under an OSS license (Nexuiz), I consider both categories free software since well, software refers to programs, code and procedures, not artwork. For this comparison, we’ll take a look at active, robust and community-developed free software shooters.